Sunday, May 5, 2013

When you are the parent of a child with special needs, guilt is a feeling you carry around as your daily cross. You never feel you are doing enough. Sometimes you feel you are doing too much. You feel guilty of spending too much time dealing with your child's special needs and perhaps not enough with his/her siblings. Other times you feel like you are NOT spending enough time and resources for your special kid. You worry about using meds or not using meds; you feel guilty for his condition and you feel guilty for his future. You feel that whatever you do or don't do now will be the one thing that will change his adult life for the better or for the worse. Yes, there is a lot of worrying going on in the mind of a parent, of any parent, really, but when it comes to our kind, the ones with special kids, well, the wrinkles in the middle of your forehead get deeper and deeper no matter what miracle product you use.

Thank God for special moments like the one I had today. I feel like this is the best mother's day gift I can ever get, although sometimes I really do want to get a MacBook Air. Really, I do. But I will take the words I heard from my Frankie any time over an awesome laptop like the MacAir. He told me he liked me and then he told me he liked the way I was raising him. Yeah, my seven year old told me that. Autism has a way to impress me sometimes to the point of being speechless. If you know me, you know it takes a lot to leave me without words and yet, there are moments when I don't know what to answer to a child that is so wise beyond his age and yet melts down over simple, everyday tasks. Does he even know what he is telling me? I always doubt it and I question him only to find out that he does know what he is saying and that he really does mean it. My parenting style is simple, I want my children, all of them, to be happy. I want them to choose the happy road and not the sad one. I want them to have hope. I want them to get up when they fall and keep on going, no matter how many times. For my little one, this is three times as hard because he falls a lot. He has to have an extra dose of strength because his path is harder and he needs to keep up no matter what. Today, he has to hold my hand to walk his path and sometimes I feel like I am dragging him. I often slow down to match his pace but one day I know he will not need me to pull him or drag him. He might not even need my hand at all. I know that day will get here and I know I will be proud to have talked the talk AND walked the walk no matter how inadequate or guilty I might have felt along the way.

Yes, I AM raising my kids the best way I can but they are teaching me, every day to be patient, to see the world through their eyes and not mine. Frankie allows me to understand that living with a condition like Autism doesn't have to be so hard. There are these moments of brightness and warmth that I would never have experienced if he wasn't around. I know my other two kids like me too. I am not sure if they like the way they are being raised the same way that Frankie does but the fact that at least one of them is telling me I don't stink as a mom, gives me confidence that no matter what I do or I don't do, the fate of my kids is beyond my control and so is their love.

To close this up, to all of you great parents out there who sometimes feel like you are not good enough, remember the latest meme and say to yourselves, Keep Calm and parent on....

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